By August, the former Farmland Industries fertilizer plant could be devoid of its unsightly equipment and crumbling buildings.

Lawrence city commissioners at their meeting on Tuesday are set to approve a more than $400,000 bid to begin demolishing structures at the 467-acre plant on the eastern edge of Lawrence.

“By August I would hope it will look a lot different,” said Matt Bond, a city engineer who is overseeing the cleanup of the property that is visible to thousands of motorists traveling each day along Kansas Highway 10.

City officials are recommending that Lawrence-based R.D. Johnson Excavating be awarded the bid to handle demolition at the site, which was acquired by the city earlier this year to be used as a future industrial park. The staff is recommending Johnson from a list of 15 companies from throughout the Midwest that submitted proposals for the cleanup.

Johnson’s proposal would cost the city $432,000. It also would allow Johnson to keep the first 1,500 tons of salvageable steel, currently valued by the city to be about $180,000, although that number will change as steel prices fluctuate. The city’s overall costs could be reduced if more than 1,500 tons of steel are recovered from the site. Johnson is proposing that the city would keep 25 percent of the value of any steel above the 1,500 ton level.

“My guess is we probably have 3,000 to 5,000 tons of steel out there, so I’m pretty confident we’ll get something out of that,” Bond said.

The demolition plans call for five buildings to remain on the site — including the laboratory building on the south end of the property and the large warehouse building along North 1500 Road on the northern end of the property. Bond said the city may use some of the buildings for sand and salt storage or storage of other equipment. The buildings eventually can be removed as the property redevelops.

If approved, plans call for demolition to begin in late January or early February, with work taking five to six months to complete.

“I think the bids were a little bit higher than we were hoping for in terms of the demolition costs,” said City Commissioner Aron Cromwell. “But we want to make sure we get it done right.”

The need to remove asbestos from the site helped drive up the cost. Two boiler units still contain asbestos, and the administration building at the front edge of the site also has asbestos. Johnson’s bid includes $213,000 for the asbestos removal.

The city plans to fund the asbestos removal with money in a remediation trust fund that the city took control of when it acquired the property from the Farmland bankruptcy trust. But the city won’t be able to use the trust fund to pay for the traditional demolition costs. The city plans to use general obligation bonds to fund the $219,000 in demolition costs.

The remediation trust fund — which has about $8.6 million — can be used to pay for the environmental cleanup related to contaminated groundwater and soil on the site. The city received access to the trust fund in exchange for agreeing to take ownership of the property and assume responsibility for its cleanup.

Bond said he believes Johnson — which has its headquarters right across K-10 from the site — is the right company to do the job.

“I know they are not going to burn any bridges,” Bond said. “One of the biggest fears I had is a company would come in here and take all the stuff of value and leave us with a lot of work left to do.”

Johnson’s proposal was not the lowest cost proposal to the city. One contractor offered to salvage the plant for no cost to the city, but staff rejected the proposal because the company did not provide a safety plan, financial assurances or a schedule for when the work could be done. On the other end of the spectrum, the city received five bids that pegged the city’s cost at more than $1 million.

Commissioners meet at 6:35 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall.